Archive for the ‘SaaS’ Category

Monday night I had the opportunity to attend an Agile Groupies meeting.  It’s a semi-regular gathering of folks (developers, business analysts, product managers, etc.) interested in a specific approach, Agile, toward software development.

For those of you not familiar, Agile development focuses on smaller development teams, working on smaller deliverables, in highly iterative, somewhat less structured approach.  Part of the thinking is that if you are delivering in smaller, more discrete ‘chunks’ of working product, that the overall process will be more ‘agile,’ more adaptive to ongoing change during a product’s overall life cycle. The idea is to move away from ‘heavy’ less flexible disciplines, and back toward lighter, freer, approaches. Read the rest of this entry »

Came across an interesting HBR post by Anthony Tjan today, “The Pros and Cons of Bundled Pricing.” If you don’t have time to read it, Tjan discusses the respective benefits for customers and vendors, depending on which side of the fence the reader is on.

Personally, I enjoyed reading the post having sat on both sides of the fence as purchaser and provider of services, sometimes at the same time. It is a difficult dichotomy to balance especially if you are trying to negotiate for win-win relationships.

One thing I learned early on in my career is (when providing a ‘solution’) to

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Energy costs.

Ask yourself, why did the economy tank last year? A popular answer is bad mortgages leading to a collapse of the financial markets…and the dominoes just fell from there. But if so, then why did Europe and Japan head into recession (by a couple quarters, at least) before the US?

If you listen to the popular economist Jeff Rubin (http://www.jeffrubinssmallerworld.com), he’ll give you an earful on why it was really triggered by 2008’s run up in oil prices. Consider that in 4 of 5 previous recessions (we can’t say about this one yet, for sure), oil spikes preceded economic recession by about 12 months each time. Interestingly, 09’s spike was nearly 500% prior spikes. I encourage you to read Jeff’s book, or at least skim the related blog post, Financial Crisis or energy Shock? You Be the Judge.

So, what happened to us as energy sky rocketed, before last year’s collapse? We started

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Back in the late 90s, as we were enjoying the glow of the dot.com boom, Andy Grove, CEO of Intel,  predicted, “…all businesses will be internet businesses, or they won’t survive.”  Instead, companies adapted to having an internet component to their business.

Now, in the late 00’s and heading into the ‘10s, Software as a Service (SaaS) has become credible, taking its rightful place as a mature business concern.  Increasingly, traditional software vendors (and others) are realizing their product offerings can continue in conventional form (here’s CD/DVD, you install, and maintain) or as a service completely delivered via the web (SaaS).

I think the path of SaaS will be parallel to what we found after Andy Grove made his original prediction for the internet.  I do not feel, ‘all software companies will be SaaS companies, or they won’t survive.’  Instead, many will develop a SaaS component of their business.

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